Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives

by Daniel J. Levitin

The Association for Psychological Science (APS) published a paper in 2016 by a team of experts led by Daniel Simons, an experimental psychologist at the University of Illinois. The team analyzed 132 papers cited by these for-profit brain-training companies. The paper is very carefully prepared and documented. It reads something like an indictment from a federal prosecutor. Of the 132 papers, 21 were review papers that did not report any new data and therefore were redundant; 15 reported on data from only a single study; 36 lacked an adequate control group; 6 papers with a control group lacked random assignment; 5 other papers had similar reasons not to include them. Of the remaining 49 papers, 25 were reporting on the same six experiments. Many of those 49 were authored or co-authored by employees of the company whose products they were testing, and so they are not independent assessments of the products. If you are not an expert, it is easy to be bowled over by the sheer number of papers cited by these companies. But you know better now. Simons’ team found, as many others had, that brain-training games develop a particular, narrow set of skills and lead to improvement in those skills but not others, even others that would seem to be related. Simons and his colleagues concluded, We found little compelling evidence that practicing cognitive tasks in brain-training products produces lasting cognitive benefits for real-world cognition. . . . If your hope is to stave off the c...

Brain training game time spent could be used for other things that one may find important.